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MAN AND NATURE

some creating is obvious. But it is surely no less obvious
that there is a limit to their powers. Blake himself half
admits it. If the doors of perception are cleansed, and
if sensual enjoyment is improved, then the world will
appear infinite and holy. And, in point of fact, artists
and mystics do succeed, from time to time and for a
brief moment, in cleansing their perception and im-
proving their sensual enjoyment—with the happiest
effects on the world in which they live. But ex-
perience shows that the processes of cleansing and im-
provement cannot go beyond a certain point, and that
the effects cannot last for more than a very short time.
We are not free to create imaginatively a world other
than that in which we find ourselves. That world is
given. For either, as common sense affirms, there is a
thing in itself outside and independent of our con-
sciousness, a thing which is unchangeably what it is, and
so limits the creative power of the imagination in just
the same way as his material limits the power of the
sculptor. Or else subjective idealism is true and we
create our world, but create it by means of a certain
type of mind which, as it can only vary within relatively
narrow limits, can only project a certain narrowly
varying kind of universe, Blake wants the world to be
different from what it is and asserts that, by some
miracle, it will become different. And in the first
moment of reading we generally believe him, because
he is a great and most persuasive artist, and because
what he says is always partly true and wholly de-
sirable. No philosopher is quite so exciting as Blake ;
for none has the art of mingling such profound and



	MAN AND NATURE some creating is obvious. But it is surely no less obvious that there is a limit to their powers. Blake himself half admits it. If the doors of perception are cleansed, and if sensual enjoyment is improved, then the world will appear infinite and holy. And, in point of fact, artists and mystics do succeed, from time to time and for a brief moment, in cleansing their perception and im- proving their sensual enjoyment—with the happiest effects on the world in which they live. But ex- perience shows that the processes of cleansing and im- provement cannot go beyond a certain point, and that the effects cannot last for more than a very short time. We are not free to create imaginatively a world other than that in which we find ourselves. That world is given. For either, as common sense affirms, there is a thing in itself outside and independent of our con- sciousness, a thing which is unchangeably what it is, and so limits the creative power of the imagination in just the same way as his material limits the power of the sculptor. Or else subjective idealism is true and we create our world, but create it by means of a certain type of mind which, as it can only vary within relatively narrow limits, can only project a certain narrowly varying kind of universe, Blake wants the world to be different from what it is and asserts that, by some miracle, it will become different. And in the first moment of reading we generally believe him, because he is a great and most persuasive artist, and because what he says is always partly true and wholly de- sirable. No philosopher is quite so exciting as Blake ; for none has the art of mingling such profound and 55